Datta Dayadhvam Damyata Shantih Shantih Shantih

Public School and The Godless Commandments

Since I’ve started blogging in the early morning I think my rant-muscle has softened. Catch me any time after about 11:15 and I’ll be ready to release my frustrations about anything from the deteriorating quality of Burn Notice to the fact that my sister’s public school has re-written the Ten Commandments with no noticable God Taint. They’re really called something line “progress for living” or some other Stuart Smalleyesque huggyfeely name. I just call them the Godless Commandments.

But right now I can only gin up enough enthusiasm to open my bottle of Coke and stare at the screen.

No. Wait….I feel another remark coming on.

Here’s the thing. I’m all for the separation of Church and State. As a Christian person I don’t want some president or congressional representative or judge telling me that I have to do something that I believe to be completely against my faith but that the Federal and State governments think is just dandy.

Frankly, as a libertarian I would vastly prefer the complete privatisation of the school system. It’s not like anyone else could do any worse at running things, really. The more I see of what goes on inside a public school via my sister the more I’m convinced that public education is a massive boondoggle. We on the outside hear about how the school system needs more money.* And they do. But what they really need are more teachers and especially teachers’ aides. If there were people hired at minimum wage or slightly above who could do a lot of the prep work then teaching professionals could actually be free to teach. My sister is spending 2/3rds of her summer “vacation” doing administrative work. It wouldn’t be so bad if her pay wasn’t based on a 40-week year. Teacher’s salaries are justified at a lower level because they have all that “vacation” time. But most of the teachers I know spend that time off doing things like cleaning their classrooms, assessing incoming students and prepping for the next year. It’s essentially five weeks of unpaid work.

*Last year when the school got a grant the money wasn’t spent on bringing in new teachers or hiring support staff for current teachers. It was spent on buying new Smartboards. Gadgets. Gadgets which require MORE prep for all-new gadget-based lessons. We’re in a ridiculous territory here.

And of course, as I mentioned earlier, the most ridiculous thing is this new Life Skills Package her secular school is introducing. Someone has gone through the ten commandments, Hammurabi’s Code, The Wiccan Rede, The Golden Rule and Common Sense to compile a series of behavioural dictats along the lines of

No Put Downs:
To never use words, actions, and/or body language to degrade, humiliate, or dishonor others

There are nice ideas behind this stuff but it just kills me that we have a bunch of historical texts across numerous faiths and cultures that already say these things. And we won’t study those faiths and cultures. Instead the goal seems to be to flush everything down the memory hole and come out with ideas that have had their historical contexts expurgated. It kind of creeps me out, actually, because it gives the feeling of floating in a sort of historical depravation tank, untethered to what came before.

I think it is an essential part of education to reinforce the idea that all people are links in a chain that stretches back into the dimness before memory. That you are special but not unconnected to the world around you, before you and after you. It gets dangerous to unmoor people from their history as it takes them away from a feeling of society and creates a sort of superego saturated by extreme self-importance.

It’s fantastic that schools are teaching decency and kindness. I just wish they wouldn’t try to make it look like those things were invented by some seminar spokesperson with basic PowerPoint skills.

Well, as someone who’s not religious, I would look at things like “no put downs” and decency and kindness as things that turn up in the world’s religions because they’re good principles for maintaining community among humans (a social animal), not things that are good principles because they are echoed or outlined by various religions. As such, I don’t have any problem with them being stripped of any specific commandment number, etc. because I don’t think “hey, let’s not kill each other off, and try not to be assholes” is a unique, original idea to any of those faiths.

Ah, I see. I agree that there is an opportunity for the multi-cultural discussion and exploration. I wonder how much time they even have to explore why these rules are necessary in the first place, and the consequences for people of not following them (beyond detention, whatever), though.

Beth, the problem is the line between teaching and raising is a pretty blurry one. Should a teacher be expected to keep order in the classroom? If so, how can they do that without teaching some basic manners, setting up rules, etc. If not, how can they be expected to teach anything at all in a chaotic environment.

I’m kind of split between you and Beth, because I agree with you both. I think that codes of behaviour should start at home, but knowing the kinds of raw material my sister gets in every year I know it isn’t realistic to NOT teach them. She has to spend a good 40% of her time teaching basic manners. It’s sort of sad, but it’s also part of _teaching_.

In an ideal world, though, it’d be great if that number could drop to 10-15%.

As it is, this whole new idea is not just teaching the Life Skills or whatever they’re called, but remaking the classroom into a more home-like environment. She literally had to buy curtains and plants to increase the homey atmosphere of her room.

I guess the idea is that children will act more mannerly in an environment that seems more welcoming/accepting. Or something. I almost wish I’d gone to the whole 2-day seminar just to follow the logic. But I do find it creepy because it seems like the school is having to assert a sort of primacy as a homespace to students because some parents can’t or won’t fulfill that part of their roles.

Maybe (don’t know ages of your sister’s class so this could be totally off) the kids are getting the first taste of something that they will then encounter again and again throughout their lives, in different contexts.

They might hear a variant of these Life Points (or whatever the heck) every week at church, or when someone reads them Aesop’s fables, or in the morals-lite dished out at the end of kids’ shows on Nickleodeon.

So maybe these denatured Power Point abominations are just a jumping-off point, not the last word on the subject? (I really want to stick up for public schools, even the dumb ones, so I know I’m stretching here.) But it’s realted to the tragedy of curriculum by committee, for sure.

This is something my husband and I were discussing just yesterday–moral similarities in cultures and religions around the world–and the recognizable archetypes in morality tales. Our discussion had more to do w/, what happens when a Christian author uses pagan archetypes in his story (see C.S. Lewis, for example). I think it’s important to understand the common threads that tie us together, rather than to continuously be divisive. If we have a common creator of the universe, we should see similar beliefs even in other religions. There is a point at which my soul would say, I can’t go there, though. But we’ve already had that discussion.

What’s the context? What grade/class does your sister teach? I think that’s a great idea for first or second graders: kids, every culture in human history has shared these guidelines for good behavior, and you should, too. And if you don’t, it’s the principal’s office for you. For a high school history of religions class, OTOH, it’s pretty lousy.

But, if you think that privatizing schools would do away with the seminar spokespersons and their PowerPoint presentations, you’re looney. Businesses are far more vulnerable to adopting a new idiocy each year than people who actually work with students.

Writers’ Advice

"Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.
Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window."
— William Faulkner